


Ten Track Sophomore Album

by junkshopdisco



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, M/M, That's it, just a relentless torrent of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-20 18:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16142567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junkshopdisco/pseuds/junkshopdisco
Summary: Nick has always lived in noise, been the cause of a lot of it, but one day a boy writes him into a pop song and the whole world dissolves into static.It doesn’t happen like that, not that easy, not that linear, but that’s the heart of it, the soul, if these things have such a thing.





	Ten Track Sophomore Album

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Writcraft for nudging me to take part and to prompters Loveheartlover and Renlyne who wanted:
> 
> Nick wakes up one morning and doesn't want to listen to music. He doesn't turn on the radio, he ignores his Spotify, he leaves the headphones at home. It's just an odd day, right? He just has to grit his teeth and get through, things will be fine in time for work on Monday. Until it's 3 months later and he still can't stand the thought of hearing another song again. People are starting to notice. Nick didn't expect ____ to be the only person to really get it.
> 
> &
> 
> Troye Sivan - The Good Side: I got the good side of life / Travelled the universe twice / So many thoughts I wanted to share / But I didn't call because it wouldn't be fair
> 
> I bundled them together and I hope this is something like you both wanted x

 

 

_i. L.A_

It’s a Wednesday and his alarm is jarring, but of course it is, because it’s his alarm and it’s Wednesday. He pokes it into silence but silence doesn’t come. Instead, the room is stuffed with a hundred noises he never usually notices: the dull tidal hum of his radiator; the squabbling of the pigeons on the skylight; a motorbike somewhere down the road that sounds like it’s got a potato stuck in its exhaust.

Beneath it, he isn’t quiet, either. His blood buzzes and his stomach knots and somewhere in his chest something flutters, desperate to alert him that something unspecified is wrong. He scrubs at his eyes, tells himself he didn’t sleep, even though he has no recollection of waking during the night. He took enough sleeping pills to make sure of that.

Maybe he had a nightmare.

Maybe that’s why the clink of his mug on the counter and the dog bowls on the floor feel like someone stabbing his brain with a screwdriver.

Maybe he’s tired. Maybe he needs a holiday.

Maybe it’s not that at all.

Maybe it’s the memory of the words on a screen, the ones he used to long for, the ones it now feels he has to ignore just to keep on existing.

_I’m putting this out as a single. Wanted you to hear it from me._

A screen grab of a note app. Verse chorus verse. It shouldn’t be enough to bring Nick to the floor.

 

_ii. Your sofa, my arms_

He forgoes breakfast, heads to the park with a pocket full of balls and dog treats and an intention to run. He used to think it was a lie told by fit people and personal trainers that running can help you escape from your thoughts. Most days he doesn’t so much escape them as leave them exhausted and gasping, but over the last however many months, it’s been enough, just enough to keep the thought wolf from the door.

He takes his phone out. Usually he heads for house music, the monotony of the beats and the constant sense of sunshine comforting as he blots out soggy trees in Hackney and conjures beaches in Ibiza, uses parties that roll into each other and never really stop to cover the ache of his knees. But today he stares at the list: Ibiza sunset; chilled house classics; Born To Run (continuous mix by Simon Dunmore). None of them seem bearable. He searches for something new, something he doesn’t know, something which has nothing already attached to it. He starts a couple, discarding them after a few bars. Annoying. Too chipper. Not _something_ enough.

The dogs circle, confused at the hold up. Nick thumbs to Frank Ocean but the method by which he’d usually press play short circuits in his brain. He decides to do without, presses his earbuds in so hard they hurt. He takes off at a pace that’s less steady than is sensible, heading for the trees, annoyed when all the running he’s been doing lately gets him there faster than he used to, faster than he’s ready for.

 

_iii. Get off_

Home.

These days it feels abstract, like a painting he doesn’t understand. He assembled it, he should know what he’s supposed to feel while he’s here. Mostly it feels like staring at something dense and boring in a gallery and his mind wandering to the frame, filling itself with banal observations borrowed from conversations he had with his mother about dusting the fiddly bits being a pain.

The shower makes a cacophony, each droplet bouncing off the tiles. It feels as if it’s happening in his eyeballs and the base of his neck and right inside of his spine.

Getting dressed takes an age. He stares at his clothes as if they belong to someone else, interlopers in his wardrobe. None of them suit the person he’s woken up as. None of them feel like his, anymore.

Downstairs, the radio that he’d usually flick on without a thought sits malevolent on the counter. He can hear it without turning it on, the burble of life, Clara talking about lunchtime and the Live Lounge, the laughter and the _life_ that’s happening just out of reach.

He tells himself to get a grip, grabs his phone to turn it on, but when his wi-fi stumbles over starting, he puts it face down on the counter, glad of the excuse.

He’s not sure what to do, wanders from room to room looking for a distraction. He can’t find one, so he just grabs his keys and leaves.

 

 _iv._   _Patchouli_

The car radio starts automatically but he snaps it off, listens to the beeping of the parking sensor as he reverses instead. He hovers there a moment, next to the bumper of a Range Rover, not pulling out of the space, the beeping sharp and insistent and just enough to pull him out of the spiralling cave that’s become the inside of his head. 

He drives on some sort of autopilot, thinking too much about the shop fronts and the outfits of the people scurrying in the wind to keep his own thoughts at bay, all the time it ticking away inside him: turn the radio on and maybe it’ll all go away.

He won’t have a choice, soon. He _is_ the radio. He’ll have to listen to whatever. He goes around the block again.

 

The studio is deadened with the _shrum_ of the door as it finds its home in the frame. The carpet tiles rustle under his feet and he’s sure he’s not shuffling, that there’s noise where there isn’t usually and that’s why everything feels like it’s caving towards him. He rearranges the pages of the schedule and adjusts the mic. The thought of talking is unbearable. He slides his headphones on, and, insulated from everything, the unnatural quiet feels like relief.

He can’t stay there. He’s got ten minutes. Ten minutes to shake this off and be _Nick Grimshaw_. Drive time is all about energy, getting people through that last dragging hour of work, making the commute more bearable, at least according to Gregory.

He slides up the fader to bring what Scott’s saying booming into one ear. He tries to tune his mind in to it but the language the words make up just isn’t there. He rolls a pen between his fingers, trying to catch something to write down, something he can use in the handover as they exchange on-brand bon mots. Instead, he writes his name over and over on the same spot, as if without it scored into the page he might actually disappear.

A track starts playing. New Drake. Nick mutes it; probably just over him because it’s Drake and Drake is everywhere. It doesn’t mean anything. None of it does. Nothing means anything. Or maybe it means too much, he’s not sure.

 

Somehow, he manages the show. He can’t remember a single thing he’s said the instant the sentences leave his mouth and he fumbles so many words fourteen different people text in to ask if he’s drunk. He watches the clock, aching for the simple passage of time, and when Annie arrives, she’s a flurry of orange and stops talking the second she catches sight of him.

“You alright, babe?”

The smile he pastes on he’s sure has cracks in it, but it’s the best he has right now. He accepts some fussing, words about that flu that’s going around, and he wishes this was viral, something chicken soup and lying down would see to, that it didn’t feel like a fundamental fracture in his soul that’s bled out into the world.

 

_v. Sushi_

Nick chucks his car keys at the bowl he’s trying to make a habit of keeping them in. He opens the fridge and then closes it again and takes the dogs for a walk.

They chase leaves and balls thrown by other people, come back to him grinning in ways that would normally make him reach for his phone. His arms are too heavy to make it to his pocket in time and he hopes that later he won’t regret not recording this moment if no more moments like this ever come.

He stands in the breeze of the oncoming night-time and flicks through the albums he has on his phone. Classics, the records he’s had with him his entire life on stolen vinyl and tape and CDs, seem like alien music implanted. New stuff is worse, shining faces on the cover art draped across pool loungers in perfect Photoshopped cool. None of it means anything. 

For the first time in his life, he understands what elderly relatives meant by _racket_. What a racket, turn that racket off, it’s just a racket, just noise. Everything is just noise. It used to have nuance, weave stories through the air and brush them into his brain but now it’s just people screaming things Nick doesn’t want to hear.

Love.

There are so many fucking songs about love. Falling into it and out of it, hating it and loving it more; the taste of it, the feel of it, the way it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand like it’s just got up from prayer. Nothing is neutral. Everything is a reminder. He feels split open, exposed at the edges, like carrion waiting for claws.

He takes himself to bed; he makes it to the weekend by just churning through the days. He’s done it before.

 

 _vi._   _Grace_

It’s Saturday and all down the street, TVs are blaring. _X Factor_ and _Strictly_ are both represented and whoever lives where the road curves is watching an art house film that looks a bit like porn. Nick can’t focus. He tried, but it’s too much like reality, all pixelated and sharp, everyone existing in happy little bubbles of noise and sequins and specially-chosen gowns.

People, their drama, their chatter, their insolent insistence he hears opinions that don’t matter about things he doesn’t care about; too much. Or not enough. No substance, an ill-fit for the way that he’s feeling, that everything is heavy and dragging, that the entire world is fucked.

He flips through the channels. Documentaries, soap operas, horror films. There’s a perverse pleasure in muting them, watching people stumble through the frame, fear comical when it’s extracted from the gravitas bestowed by the soundtrack. The way music does that… how did he never notice before?

He stares at his own life in the empty, black screen before the adverts. It stares back. Blank. Haunted. The face of someone who’s in a music-less, context-less free-fall, just waiting to hit the ground.

 

_vii. Borrowed Jeans_

Nick read somewhere that tears aren’t emotional, they’re chemical, your body’s way of processing things, that evolution decided the best way to deal with all the _feeling_ is to spew it out of your eyeballs.

 _Homeostasis,_ he thinks it’s called. He clings to the word, to the idea that if he lets it, his body will ease this on a chemical level, heal him one atom at a time. He stares at the wall with the weight of unshed water in his throat waiting for it.

He’s been doing a lot of spewing this year. Every time it happens, he can’t help thinking how unstable he must be inside, because he’s cried and cried and cried and still, equilibrium never comes.

 

 _viii. (Vanish into) Thin Air_  

In the weeks that follow, he copes with it, with his new music-less, too noisy world. He reads album reviews obsessively, picking up things he can regurgitate on air, memorises snippets from critics he can reference and tweeted thoughts he can pass off as his own. New Arctic Monkeys, a Rita Ora collab, an exciting newly out rapper oozing queerness from every pore. It all would’ve enraptured him, once, the ripples of music to culture and back, but now it feels like it’s for other people, that he’s trespassing in a land where he doesn’t belong.

He gets by. He manages. He dreads it less and less, the moment someone notices, because he realises no one really pays him that much attention when he’s not actively trying to obtain it. He finds playlists of static — white noise and brown noise and even pink, all of them different and varied kinds of buzzing to fill the inside of his head. If he has his headphones in, no one bothers him, and no one can tell that he’s not listening to something, he’s just actively not listening to the world.

Eventually it’s on the playlist: new single; Harry Styles; announces another world tour. A girlfriend, too, appears, from a film he made over the summer: co-stars get cosy, go public with a coffee date, paparazzi on the side.

He sees the LA sunshine pixelated by the paper, the sub header about sources close to say he’s committed to making it work, this time. He reads the conspiracies, the deconstruction of showmance and the publicity machine. _Her name is Grace, it’s not real,_ with fourteen panicked exclamation marks Nick wishes he didn’t also feel.

He wants to tell them they’re right, it is all a construct, a scrupulous work in identity, of sorts: a girlfriend who could be from the pages of a coffee book, an arthouse history of the 60s; he chose her specially for how she fits with how he’d like to be seen. Dating a co-star, from the playbook of Jagger. Allusions to women in song titles, same. None of it is grounded in Harry, so much as how things seem.

Nick sighs at his own petulance; he hates hating people, makes an effort to see other things. Maybe he likes the way her hair looks in sunlight. Maybe she’s funny. Maybe she’s just there and not loaded with a million reasons not to. Whatever. When he gives her up for touring, for her own good, for sanity, he’ll weave himself a story where he’s the only one who hurts, one where he truly believed.

He remembers when those thoughts would’ve shocked him.

The beginning, when Harry was younger and less polished, when he dossed on Nick’s sofa and thought takeaway sushi was a ludicrous luxury, when he still had hair out of a period drama and stole Nick’s jeans and then pretended he hadn’t when he wore them on the cover of a magazine. He’d come over without a reason; stay for something particular. For Nick, or so Nick used to think.

“Oh, you’re already here.” Nick would tug off his headphones, faking surprise at finding Harry in his kitchen wearing his jumper and a smile all skew-iff. “You — wait, are you cooking something? Thought we were getting a Chinese to wash down that atrocious wine you bought last week?”

A soft roll of his eyes, a shift from foot to foot. Nick never could tell if he was nervous or just playing it, acting long before he was on a silver screen.

“How’d you get in, anyway?"

“You should find somewhere less cliché to keep the spare key, Grim.”

He remembers the first time it was anything other than playful flirting, opened and put back on the sofa. His inhaler lay on the bedside table next to a glass of water gone bubbly from the night before and a couple of shirts he’d rejected that evening watched, tossed over the back of the chair. Fingers skipped across his stomach, fleeting and searing like lightning trapped inside the clouds, and it was weird to see Harry so serious and uncertain, having known him so well and so long. Nick thought, right there in that moment: maybe there are two versions of everyone, the one they are when they’re just walking around and another one, smaller, more private, the person they are when they’re taking a leap that leaves them with someone else’s orgasm in their hands.

He could’ve coped with two, but there were infinite Harrys. There was the one who showed up in the middle of the night and texted in for a request in the morning, the one who sat in board meetings and talked about investing, the one who shunned hit-making songwriters and stole away to resorts to write about assignations in the vaguest of terms. There was one curated for chat shows and another one for junket interviews, one for Instagram and one for twitter and one for tour photos artfully staged in front of exit signs. There was one for fans and one for brands and one for newsstands, and the one that lived in quiet desperation behind Nick’s locked front door.

He remembers the phone sex, the texts full of pictures, the drives through the night and the long haul flights which only ever lead to collapsing. Collapsing into each other, into a life that was always on pause, into resignation and whispered conversations:

“How long have I got you for?”

“Almost three days.”

“That long? Christ, I’ll get bored.”

He remembers the good, the flowers and the surprises and twisting his fingers in Harry’s hair backstage while thousands of people were screaming for more. Those nights, Nick lay awake thinking about ingesting stardust, his insides on fire with this intangible, infinite thing.

He remembers the bad, the fear of discovery and the arguments and Harry calling from the bathroom of a five star hotel, off his face on something he took he didn’t bother to ask the name of, talking hysterical nonsense until he passed out crying on the floor. Nick lay awake that night with his phone clutched in his hand, expecting the dawn to bring headlines about how someone had to kick in the door.

The end, he doesn’t remember. Sometimes it plays on his mind that there must’ve been a _bye, Nick_ , that passed like thousands before it, one that had finality in it he didn’t recognise at the time.

It doesn’t matter. It’s all dust, now, anyway, spinning somewhere on a Crosley inside the groove of a record bought in a bundle with a t-shirt and limited edition postcard from Harry’s online store.

 

 _ix._   _Untitled_  

He doesn’t listen to it, but it gets in anyway, in gifs he doesn’t mean to look for. In infinite loops, Harry sings it live, a little more confident each night, a different outfit, a different way for his hair to fall into his eyes, a different kind of torment seeing each new way his lips can play around the line.

It’s not enough to inure him; nothing is.

Nick mutes the track as soon as it starts playing, rubs at his temple, silently hinting at a headache he doesn’t have.

“Heard the new album yet?”

They always talk about Harry, always without saying his name. No-one else exists between them in this nameless, ever-present way.

Nick shakes his head.

“Same.” Niall lifts his coffee. It can’t be more than tepid but he holds it against his lip as if he’s still waiting for it to cool. “Don’t know what I’m scared of. Being on it or not.”

Nick looks at him around the curve of his microphone. Behind him, the marketing team are scrolling through the photos they just took of them both linking arms and smiling as if the tiredness they’re feeling doesn’t go right down to their core.

Niall lowers his voice. “He won’t say, either way, so you’re good.”

Nick looks down.

Niall sighs, like he knows it’s not that simple, but in truth it’s been easier than Nick expected, it being out there. No rampaging fans on his doorstep. No camped out photographers. Maybe it’s not as obvious as he thought.

“Quiet in here today.”

“Sorry.”

Niall waves it off. “Makes a nice change — sometimes I lie awake at night wishing I had a shed.” 

“A shed?”

“Somewhere at the bottom of the garden I could go to where everything’s all quiet and dark, y’know?”

“And full of spiders.”

Niall shrugs, sips at his coffee, this time. “Put up with them, wouldn’t ya, for a bit of respite from the relentlessness of everything. Way you put up with a lot of things when there’s something that comes along with that you want.”

He looks at Nick like he gets it, all of it, the way Harry exists in the gaps in Nick’s life, why Nick can’t stand words, love, people anymore. Maybe he can see it in the shadows under Nick’s eyes and the jumper he’s wearing that’s now two sizes too big and the way he keeps looking past everything to the door.

“We talking about this on air?” Nick says.

“If you like.” Niall reaches for the biro Nick discarded two tracks ago, points it at him. “Can we pretend I said studio not shed, though? Less of an old man, _Gardener’s World_ vibe.”

They don’t talk about it, in the end. They take callers and Niall doles out advice on anxiety and exams and how to get out of a date when you want to watch the football. He speaks all of it like he’s talking to Nick directly, saying things which aren’t in his words, and it’s the best he’s felt in ages, sitting across from someone else who’s run out the clock on the expectation that Harry will call.

 

_x. Late night radio host_

  _After the stomping rock and fag-lighters aloft stadium bombast, Styles’s ten track sophomore album culminates with a stripped down ballad. Ostensibly about the loneliness of touring life, it reads like an apology to a lover forsaken on the road to fame. At first, it might seem an odd choice for lead single but in context, it proves one of the album’s highlights, a rare peek behind the curtain at the man whose emotions are pulling the strings of instant classics Borrowed Jeans and Untitled._

> _Listening to late night radio_
> 
> _Contemplating everything_
> 
> _Everything we were_
> 
> _Everything we might’ve been_
> 
> _Everything, everything, everything_
> 
> _Calling in a request for forgiveness,_
> 
> _From a man who had, and lost, it all_

_As he sings the final lines, Styles’s voice moves from raspy to breaking. Producer Belinda Howard recalls there was only one take and Styles insisted on using it. “It was important to him for it to be an honest expression of how he felt,” she says._

_For his part, Styles has refused to comment on who the song is about. He says he prefers that people bring their own interpretation to his work. Fans are unlikely to mind doing just that and with its whimsical, catchy chorus, Late Night Radio Host should keep playlists on both sides of the Atlantic busy for some time._

 

The kitchen feels less sombre than it has of late; or maybe it’s him. Nick almost smiles as he lands his keys in the bowl. He could make a game of it on air, the getting home Olympics — champion of getting keys in the bowl and chucking socks into the laundry in a ball.

He’s not intending to do it, not really. A kind of autopilot kicks in that places his fingers beyond his command and somehow action transitions out of a thought he’s not been thinking directly, one that’s just been vaguely omnipresent, ticking over, growing stronger, creating an inescapable momentum that’s taken over all his cells.

He doesn’t even know if it’s his number anymore, but he dials it, rehearsing greetings, not knowing how his tone will sound when the words fall from his mouth. A melody of sorrow, a too breezy show tune, neither of them and like nothing at all.

“Hi Harry,” he says. “It’s me. I heard it.”

He doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t say anything further. Leaves a minute of static on Harry’s answering machine.

Noise for noise.

Silence for silence.

When it’s done, it really feels done. Harry knows what was done, and that’s all.

He flips on the radio. Hottest record. Annie and some indie band Nick probably shouldn’t ignore. A break in the nothingness. A line about love and devotion and his heart heaves. He wants to turn it off again, but he doesn’t, lets it play out, thinking of all the people in all the lyrics in all the songs written in the world.

He’s not alone in this feeling of being robbed of something at the same time as being rewarded; he wishes it counted for more.

 

The park is quiet. The dogs race and gambol like there isn’t a care to be had in the universe. Nick fiddles with his headphones, then his playlist, white noise brown noise pink, but it isn’t what he wants anymore. He finds something old he borrowed from his sister, lets it wrap itself around him while he walks.

Nick has always lived in noise, been the cause of a lot of it, and now he’s in a pop song. He’ll be part of the background in salons and boutiques and discount shopping outlets, and screamed back at the stage on a set list which’ll go around the world.

He doesn’t know how it happened. It wasn’t easy, wasn’t linear, but the heart of it, the soul of it, if these things have such a thing, is that something he thought was infinite has become ephemera.

Or maybe it’s the other way round.

 

 


End file.
